Tight rental market causes many NYC residents shun brokers' fees

With rents in the Big Apple approaching record highs, anxious tenants are looking for any way possible to keep costs down. Knowing that they might already be contributing the lion's share of their paychecks to their landlords, many residents in the apartment market have decided they will refuse to pay a broker's fee. With tensions tight and options low in the market, now might be the ideal time to buy one of the houses for sale in New York, NY.

Facing high rents and limited options, four out of 10 New Yorkers said they will avoid paying a fee to a broker even if it means making considerable changes to their life and location, Crain's Business reports.

These fees, which typically amount to around 15 percent of an apartment's yearly cost, are apparently the last straw for frustrated renters. Many of the more than one thousand survey respondents said they were willing to go to great lengths to avoid the charges. Some participants said they would rather live in New Jersey and commute to work, while others claimed they would forego dining out if it allowed them to circumvent the loathed fee.

One alternative that is perhaps less drastic would be to buy a living space instead of renting. With the market incredibly tight, the attractiveness of owning a home instead of renting a property becomes more apparent. There are some great homes for sale in New York, NY, which may not be the case for rental units.

In fact, according to Crain's, the apartment stock is incredibly low. In Manhattan last year, the vacancy rate was around 1 percent, and as of May 2012, it had dropped all the way to 0.89 percent. With so few apartments available, and so many seekers, rents have recently been moving skyward. If this wasn't bad enough on its own, the prospect of paying a broker's fee on top of the already-high rents has been discouraging to many, and distinguished the metro's market from others around the country - and not in a good way.

"New York has always been a different market," Christina Aragon, who analyzed the survey results, told the news source. "At this point in time, there's such a frenzy; those differences are exaggerated."

Published by staff writer on July 26, 2012

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